For five weeks to a day we wandered over the eastern country at our own sweet will, not a care, not a responsibility,—­days without seeing newspapers, finding mail and telegrams at infrequent intervals, but much of the time lost to the world of friends and acquaintances.

Touring on an automobile differs from coaching, posting, railroading, from every known means of locomotion, in that you are really lost to the world.  In coaching or posting, one knows with reasonable certainty the places that can be made; the itinerary is laid out in advance, and if departed from, friends can be notified by wire, so that letters and telegrams may be forwarded.

With an automobile all is different.  The vagaries of the machine upset every itinerary.  You do not know where you will stop, because you cannot tell when you may stop.  If one has in mind a certain place, the machine may never reach it, or, arriving, the road and the day may be so fine you are irresistibly impelled to keep on.  The very thought that letters are to be at a certain place at a certain date is a bore, it limits your progress, fetters your will, and curbs your inclinations.  One hears of places of interest off the chosen route; the temptation to see them is strong exactly in proportion to the assurances given that you will go elsewhere.

The automobile is lawless; it chafes under restraint; will follow neither advice nor directions.  Tell it to go this way, it is sure to go that; to turn the second corner to the right, it will take the first to the left; to go to one city, it prefers another; to avoid a certain road, it selects that above all others.

It is a grievous error to tell friends you are coming; it puts them to no end of inconvenience; for days they expect you and you do not come; their feeling of relief that you did not come is destroyed by your appearance.

The day we were expected at a friend’s summer home at the sea-side we spent with the Shakers in the valley of Lebanon, waiting for a new steering-head.  Telegrams of inquiry, concern, and consolation reached us in our retreat, but those who expected us were none the less inconvenienced.

Then, too, what business have the dusty, grimy, veiled, goggled, and leathered party from the machine among the muslin gowns, smart wraps, and immaculate coverings of the conventional house party; if we but approach, they scatter in self-protection.

From these reflections it is only too plain that the automobile —­like that other inartistic instrument of torture, the grand piano —­is not adapted to the drawing-room.  It is not quite at home in the stable; it demands a house of its own.  If the friend who invites you to visit him has a machine, then accept, for he is a brother crank; but if he has none, do not fill his generous soul with dismay by running up his drive-way, sprinkling its spotless white with oil, leaving an ineradicable stain under the porte-cochere, and frightening his favorite horses into fits as you run into the stable.